1. Jarvis, Edward to Haven, Samuel F., 03 24, 1840Google Scholar, ALS in American Antiquarian Society, Corresponding Secretary's file; quoted in Dunlap, Leslie W., American Historical Societies, 1790–1860 (Madison, Wise: privately printed, 1944), p. 8.Google Scholar

2. The complaint as a test of “insiderness” deserves serious investigation in connection with the development of patterns of group identity in the nineteenth century. Recent studies of the role of positive statement in the professionalization of American science include Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory, The Formation of the American Scientific Community: The American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1848–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), esp. p. 132 ff.Google Scholar; Flack, J. Kirkpatrick, Desideratum in Washington: The Intellectual Community in the Capital City, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman Publishing Co., 1975), esp. pp. 77Google Scholar ff.; and Cravens, Hamilton, The Triumph of Evolution: American Scientists and the Heredity-Environment Controversy, 1900–1941 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), esp. pp. 91–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. On Draper, see Hesseltine, William B., Pioneer's Mission: The Story of Lyman Copeland Draper (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1954)Google Scholar. Also Gara, Larry, “Lyman Copeland Draper,” in Lord, Clifford L., ed., Keepers of the Past (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), pp. 40–52Google Scholar; and esp. Whitehill, Walter Muir, Independent Historical Societies: An Inquiry into Their Research and Publication Functions and Their Financial Future (Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 1962), pp. 243–67.Google Scholar

The establishment of disposal schedules is a routine problem faced by records managers and archivists. For those institutions that do not maintain a records-management program, a handy pamphlet offering disposal schedule recommendations is available from the Electric Wastebasket Corporation of New York, a manufacturer of home and office-sized paper-shredders, “[advertisement:] How Long Must You Keep Important Papers,” Wall Street Journal, 02 11, 1981, 48:1.Google Scholar

4. Dunlap, , American Historical SocietiesGoogle Scholar, mentions such events in passing; his interest is in the development of historical societies as the servants of professionalized history. In contrast, the literature of librarianship and of archives and records-management views such “accidents” as among the principal reasons for the establishment of institutional mechanisms for records-collection, e.g., Schellenberg, Thomas R., Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 6–7Google Scholar and notes; Posner, Ernst, American State Archives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 13–15Google Scholar and notes; and esp. Wood, Richard G., “Richard Bartlett, Minor Archival Prophet,” American Archivist, 17, 1954, 13–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. The story is told in SirFoster, William, ed., A Guide to the India Office Records, 1600–1858 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1919).Google Scholar

6. For example, Dr. John M. Riddle of Cincinnati inadvertently brought the records of the Western Academy of Natural Sciences with him when he moved to New Orleans; following his death, his personal and professional papers were sold to the local paper-maker for recycling and the Academy's records were thus lost; Western Academy of Natural Sciences Minutes, 1 (March 31, 1838), in Cincinnati Historical Society.

7. Cf. Susman, Warren I., “The Useless Past: American Intellectuals and the Frontier Thesis, 1910–1930,” Bucknell Review, 11 (1963), 1–20Google Scholar; “History and the American Intellectual: Uses of a Usable Past,” American Quarterly, 16 (1964), 243–63Google Scholar; and especially Culture as History: The Transformation ofAmerican Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985)Google Scholar. An earlier version of this essay was prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in 1981, of which Susman was program chair. It was intended — as is this — as partial acknowledgement of my debt to him for having introduced me to the issues discussed here, and in gratitude for his companionship over twenty-five years as teacher and friend.

8. On the extramural location of the new cemeteries of the mid-nineteenth century, see Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed. (1875)Google Scholar, s.v. “Cemeteries.” The attic or lumber-room as unfinished, and its contents unorganized, is a persisting image through the nineteenth century, most familiar to us in the introductory pages of The Scarlet Letter; but see also the remarks of J. B. McMaster, n. 49. As the center-periphery model of the city became dominant after the turn of the century, a new image gained currency for use in describing the suburban situation, as in Strunsky, Simeon, “The City's Ragged Edges,” Harper's Magazine, 132 (1916), 437–47.Google Scholar

My discussion of the “new” cemeteries of the mid-nineteenth century derives in part from a continuing dialogue with Blanche Linden-Ward, begun many years ago, and has been informed (and I suspect substantially influenced) by her work, esp. Death and the Garden: The Cult of Melancholy and the “Rural” Cemetery, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1981.Google Scholar

9. The analogy between cemetery corporations and land corporations during the mid-nineteenth century appears, e.g., in 19 Ohio laws 111; 29 Ohio laws 272; 33 Ohio laws 11; 46 Ohio laws 97 (“making provision for the incorporation of cemetery associations, passed Feb. 24, 1848”); 50 Ohio laws 135 (“for the assessment and taxation of all property in this state and for levying taxes thereon according to its true value in money, passed April 13, 1852”), etc.; also, e.g., in the inclusion of cemetery lot-sales among land transactions listed in the daily newspapers.

10. E.g., City of Cincinnati, “An Ordinance Regulating Interments in the City of Cincinnati,” Dec. 5, 1832; “An Ordinance To Prevent the Interment of the Dead within the Limits of the City,” July 11, 1855.

11. Cf. [Appleton's] New American Cyclopaedia: A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge, edited by George Ripley and Charles A. Dana (1857), s.v. “Embalming,” for evidence of this interest. The relationship between the vogue for Egyptian monuments in cemeteries, most notably the Egyptian gate at the entrance to Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., and contemporary efforts at recapturing the lost Egyptian technology of embalming may be presumed.

12. Changes in mortuary technology are discussed in Habenstein, Robert W. and Lamars, William L., A History of American Funeral Directing (Milwaukee: Bulfin Printers for the National Funeral Directors Association of the United States, Inc., 1955).Google Scholar

13. The “Privacy” of burial sites within the cemetery as the analogue of the individuality of persons (to be) buried and as a way of maintaining that individuality is a regular theme of the literature on the “new” cemetery of the mid-nineteenth century, e.g., Strauch, Adolph, Spring Grove Cemetery: Its History and Improvements (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1869).Google Scholar

14. Dunlap, , American Historical SocietiesGoogle Scholar, describes their organization and activities. My numbers are also from Dunlap, to whose list I have added (founding dates are in parentheses): New England Historic Genealogical Society (1844), American Lutheran Historical Society (1848), Protestant Episcopal Historical Society (1850), and Presbyterian Historical Society (1852). Dunlap's list is apparently based on A. P. C. Griffin, comp., Bibliography of American Historical Societies (The United States and the Dominion of Canada), 2d ed., published as American Historical Association, Annual Report 1905, vol. 2Google Scholar. A more complete list for the first half of the nineteenth century, thought difficult to use, appears in Rhees, William J., comp., Manual of Public Libraries, Institutions, and Societies in the United States, and British Provinces of North America (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1859).Google Scholar

15. The literature on historical societies as “learned societies,” hence as agencies for the achievement of high culture in the United States, is substantial, and includes Lord, Keepers of the Past; Whitehill, Independent Historical Societies and The East India Marine Society and the Peabody Museum of Salem (Salem, Mass.: Peabody Museum, 1949)Google Scholar; and numerous monographs on the history of particular societies. Also important in this connection are the essays in Bell, Whitfield J. et al. , A Cabinet of Curiosities: Five Episodes in the Evolution of American Museums (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1967)Google Scholar, and in Oleson, Alexandra and Brown, Sanborn B. eds., The Pursuit of Knowledge in the Early American Republic: American Scientific and Learned Societies from Colonial Times to the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

16. On the rise and decline of the American history societies, see Dunlap, , American Historical SocietiesGoogle Scholar. The number of natural history societies in this period is not entirely clear. Bates, Ralph S., Scientific Societies in the United States, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965)Google Scholar, shows a pattern of increase almost identical to that indicated by Dunlap's study, although Bates's numbers show survivors by decade rather than foundings. In her important study of natural history societies, The Formation of the American Scientific Community, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt warns (esp. p. 32 n. 22) that Bates's numbers require significant upward revision, but whether the meaning of the pattern would thereby be changed is not clear. The analogue of Griffin's bibliography (n. 14) for the natural history societies is Meisel, Max, comp., Bibliography of American Natural History, 3 vols. (New York: The Premier Publishing Co. 1924–1929).Google Scholar

17. “An Act To Incorporate the Historical Society of Ohio,” passes Feb. 1, 1822, 20 Ohio laws (local) 47, and Dunlap, , American Historical Societies, p. 194Google Scholar, based on Venable, William H., The Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1891), p. 146.Google Scholar

18. “An Act To Incorporate the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio,” passed Feb. 11, 1831, 29 Ohio laws (local) 122. There is no adequate account of the history of the HPSO. Except as noted, this account is based on Venable, Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley, pp. 148Google Scholar ff., and its elaboration in Tucker, Louis Leonard, “Clio Comes to the Old Northwest,” Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin, 38 (1980), 221–32.Google Scholar

19. The history of the Cincinnati Historical Society of 1844–49 is obscure. It published one volume of Annals in 1845, comprising copies of circulars sent to societies and individuals explaining the purposes of the society and soliciting contributions to its collections, and an “Address to the Cincinnati Historical Society” by D. K. Este. How active a group it was between 1845 and 1848 is not clear.

20. Shapiro, Henry D., “The Western Academy of Natural Sciences of Cincinnati and the Structure of Science in the Ohio Valley, 1810–1850”Google Scholar in Oleson, and Brown, , Pursuit of Knowledge, pp. 219–47Google Scholar. Transfer of the Academy's library and cabinet to the Cincinnati Natural History Society is discussed in Hendrickson, Walter B., “The Western Academy of Natural Sciences of Cincinnati,” Isis, 37 (1947), 138–45.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

21. “Preface,” in HPSO Publications, n.s. 1:[5].

22. In 1963 the society moved to quarters of its own, newly constructed as a wing of the Cincinnati Art Museum in Eden Park. At that time, its name was changed (back) to “Cincinnati Historical Society,” Tucker, , “Clio Comes to the Old Northwest,” p. 231.Google Scholar

23. Discussed below. An historical “seminary” was organized at the Ohio State University in 1886.

24. Cf. Sessions, F. C., “The History and Prospects of the Society,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, 1 (1888), 332–40.Google Scholar

25. Ekirch, Arthur, The Idea of Progress in America, 1815–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944).Google Scholar

26. I take it that the relationship between the remembered ideal of progress as perfectability of the eighteenth century and the contemporary idea of progress as inevitible fact is the problem underlying much of the “distress” that recent scholarship has identified as characteristic of the so-called age of Jackson, e.g., Somkin, Fred, Unquiet Eagle: Memory and Desire in the Idea of American Freedom, 1815–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; and that it gave shape to much of the contemporary discourse on the nature and future of the United States while providing both the subject and the inspiration for Herman Melville's extended pun, Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1855)Google Scholar, and more particularly for the sub-pun on “Chronometricals and Horologicals”; on which see esp. Bercovitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 28 ff.Google Scholar

27. Walsh, Robert, “History,” American Quarterly Review, 9, 5 (1829), 85–99Google Scholar, quotations pp. 94–5, 97.

28. Walsh, Robert, “Democracy in America. De la Democratic en Amerique. Par Alexis de Tocqueville,” American Quarterly Review, 19 (1836), 124–66Google Scholar, quotation p. 131. On the contemporary dilemma of holding the mirror up to nature when nature is a brook as above, cf. Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953).Google Scholar

29. Sparks, Jared, “Harby's Discourse on the Jewish Synagogue. The Constitution of the Reformed Society of Israelites … in Charleston, and A Discourse … before the Reformed Society of Israelites,” North American Review, 23 (1826), 67–79, quotation p. 67.Google Scholar

30. Sparks, Jared, “The Songs of Scotland, Ancient and Modern … By Allan Cunningham,” North American Review, 23 (1826), 124–42Google Scholar, quotation p. 142. Also of interest in this connection are “Classification of Words. Analytical Outlines of the English Language …” by John Lewis, ibid., pp. 109–24, and “Correspondence on the History of the Law,” ibid., pp. 197–201, both of which emphasize the power of inductive analysis to break free of old schemes of classification. On this latter theme in the words and work of contemporary naturalists, see Daniels, George H., American Science in the Age of Jackson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968).Google Scholar

31. On the need to preserve information, and on objects as the containers or emblems of information, cf. Isaiah Thomas, “An Account of the American Antiquarian Society,” October 1813, reprinted in Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 1812–1849 (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1912), 14–19Google Scholar; Drake, Daniel, “Anniversary Address to the School of Literature and the Arts” (1814)Google Scholar and “Anniversary Discourse, on the State and Prospects of the Western Museum Society,” (1820)Google Scholar, reprinted in Physician to the West: Selected Writings of Daniel Drake on Science and Society, edited by Shapiro, Henry D. and Miller, Zane L. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970)Google Scholar; and esp. Greene, John C., “Science, Learning, and Utility: Patterns of Organization in the Early American Republic,”Google Scholar in Oleson, and Brown, , Pursuit of Knowledge, pp. 1–20.Google Scholar

32. Dupree's challenging essay appeared as “The National Pattern of American Learned Societies, 1769–1863,” in Oleson, and Brown, , Pursuit of Knowledge, pp. 21–32Google Scholar. Nathan Reingold provides a useful analysis of the “auxiliary sciences” to history from the perspective of information theory, in “Reflections of an Unrepentant Editor,” American Archivist, 46 (1983), 14–21.Google Scholar

On the function of historical study when information was held to be finite, see e.g. Schlereth, Thomas J., The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), esp. 62ff. and references.Google Scholar

33. This Baconianism was the opposite of that induction from things to facts which constituted the “Baconian method” discussed in Daniels, American Science in the Age of Jackson, and that, in the context of the mid-nineteenthcentury belief in progress, was expected to free knowledge from the dead hand of the past. On Baconian hope and Baconian failure, see, e.g., Shapiro, Henry D., “The Western Academy of Natural Sciences”Google Scholar and for contrast, my article “Daniel Drake's ‘Sensorium Commune’ and the Organization of a Second American Enlightenment,” Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin, 27 (1969), 43–52.Google Scholar

34. John Adams to Jeremy Belknap, quoted in Riley, Stephen T., “Jeremy Belknap,”Google Scholar in Lord, , Keepers of the Past, p. 26Google Scholar. Adams adds that while he would encourage the preservation of documents, “some of these ought not to be public, but they ought not to be lost. My experience has very much diminished my faith in the veracity of history; it has convinced me that many of the most important facts are concealed,… many false facts imposed on historians and the world, and many empty characters displayed in great pomp.” Note also in this connection the contemporary fascination with Munchausenism.

35. Dunlap, , American Historical Societies, passim.Google Scholar

36. Thomas Jefferson to Ebenezer Howard, quoted in Whitehall, , Independent Historical Societies, p. 4Google Scholar. The maintenence of republican virtue and the political conflict that developed over the attempt to define it is also a theme in lateeighteenth-century projects to publish copies of documents as a means of communication and/or propaganda, discussed, e.g., in Cunningham, Noble E. Jr., The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), pp. 15–29Google Scholar (on the newspaper war), and White, Leonard D., The Federalists: A Study in Administrative History (New York: Macmillan, 1956), pp. 482, 505–6.Google Scholar

On history as cyclical, see the seminal essay by Persons, Stow, “The Cyclical Theory of History in the Eighteenth Century,” American Quarterly, 6 (1954), 147–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37. Thomas, Isaiah, “An Account of the American Antiquarian Society,” 1813Google Scholar, in Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (1912), p. 14Google Scholar. The “last century and a half,” of course, refers to the establishment of the Royal Society.

38. Thomas, Benjamin F., “Report of the Council,” 05 30, 1849Google Scholar, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (1912), p. 557Google Scholar. On the daguerrotype as preserver of the fleeting moment (n.b. often under glass), the Daguerrean Gallery as museum, and on Matthew Brady's plan to collect daguerrean portraits of every American president, see the standard works-Robert Taft, Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839–1889 (New York: Macmillan, 1938)Google Scholar, and Newhall, Beaumont, The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949 & 1964).Google Scholar

39. Quoted respectively in Riley, , “Jeremy Belknap,”Google Scholar in Lord, , Keepers of the Past, p. 26Google Scholar, and Whitehill, , Independent Historical Societies, p. 4.Google Scholar

40. On the “degeneration” of the American Museum, see Whitehill, , Independent Historical SocietiesGoogle Scholar, and Stokes, I. N. Phelps, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909, 6 vols. (New York: Robert H. Dodd, 1915–1928), 5:1267, 6:47–8Google Scholar, where the eventual purchase of the American Museum by P. T. Barnum is noted.

41. Jennison, Samuel, “Report to the Council, May 31, 1848,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (1912), p. 539Google Scholar. The earliest statement of this kind of which I am aware appears in the context of Isaiah Thomas's petition to the Massachusetts Court that a deed book “which book long since became obsolete, and is made no use of whatever,” be deposited in the Antiquarian Society, ibid. 99–100, note. I am indebted to William Joyce, now of the New York Public Library, for calling this to my attention.

42. The annual reports of the council and librarian of the American Antiquarian Society provide convenient examples of the emerging concept of the rare book as such, of collecting as an activity, and of “collecting-to-completion” as a goal of librarianship, rather than collecting for the sake of what is collected; cf. in Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (1912)Google Scholar, Christoper Columbus Baldwin, “Librarian's Report,” 05 28, 1834Google Scholar, Oct. 12, 1834, pp. 282–3, 290, on the plan to collect all the publications of American authors; Lincoln, William F., “Report of the Council,” 05 29, 1839, p. 375Google Scholar, on the collection of “rare” manuscripts; Lincoln, “Report,” and Haven, Samuel F., “Librarian's Report,” 05 29, 1839, p. 379Google Scholar, on the desirability of completing the Society's collection of newspapers; and Haven, Samuel F., “Librarian's Report,” 05 31, 1848, p. 540Google Scholar, on the acquisition of rare books.

43. Paine, William, M.D., “Annual Address,” 10 13, 1815Google Scholar, in Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (1912), p. 89Google Scholar. Dunlap, , American Historical Societies, pp. 123Google Scholar ff., discusses the use of the collections by historians, but see esp. Kraus, Michael, A History of American History (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937), pp. 163–90, 263Google Scholar ff., on the vogue for antiquarian research, and such contemporary comments as those of Jared Sparks, “Materials for American History. Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania,” North American Review, 23 (1826), 275–94Google Scholar, or Walsh, Robert, “Pennsylvania History. Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania,” American Quarterly Review, 19 (1836), 288–306.Google Scholar

44. E.g., [Appleton's] American Cylclopaedia: A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge, edited by George Ripley and Charles A. Dana (1876), s.v. “United States (Literature), III. 1820–1876.”

45. A brief sketch of the theoretical debate appears in Willey, Gordon A. and Sabloff, Jeremy A., A History of American Archaeology (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974), pp. 31–41Google Scholar, but the best accounts of contemporary confrontations with the artifacts and their meaning appear in the American Antiquarian Society's Proceedings, esp. Davis, John, “Report of the Council,” 10 23, 1847Google Scholar, and Haven, Samuel F., “Librarian's Report,” 05 31, 1848Google Scholar, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (1912), pp. 529–31, 541–45Google Scholar. An attempt at summary and synthesis appears in [Appleton's] New American Encyclopedia (1857), s.v. “American Antiquities.”

46. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, “The Custom House-Introductory,” in The Scarlet Letter (1850).Google Scholar

47. Cf. Lukacs, Georg, The Historical Novel (1936)Google Scholar; trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 15, for a different reading of the character of the historical novel. For the emergence of the historical novel in America see esp. Miller, Perry, The Raven and The Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1956)Google Scholar, which answers F. O. Matthiessen's assertion of the dominance of Emersonianism in the age of the “American Renaissance.” Leisy, Ernest E., The American Historical Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950)Google Scholar, imagines the historical novel to be a complement to or substitute for the historical narrative for twentieth-century readers, and hence classifies novels by their subject.

48. E.g. Whitehill, , Independent Historical Societies, pp. 30–1, 44, 77Google Scholar, and East India Marine Society, esp. p. 54Google Scholar ff., “George Peabody, Ex Machina.” Corson, Hampton L., in A History of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Historical Society, 1940)Google Scholar, does his best to ignore entirely the existence of nondocumentary material in the collections of the society during the nineteenth century, although these are described briefly in Volume 2, pp. 228, 513.

49. Quoted in Corson, , Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Vol. 2, p. 18Google Scholar, where the design of the new facility is also discussed.

50. On the transformation of the societies and their activities during this period, see Kraus, , History of American HistoryGoogle Scholar. The contemporary arguments appear in the AHA Annual Report, 1897Google Scholar; Jameson, John Franklin, “The Functions of the State and Local History Societies with Respect to Research and Publication,” pp. 51–9Google Scholar, and Thwaites, Reuben Gold, “State Supported Historical Societies and Their Functions,” pp. 61–71Google Scholar. See also the committee reports prepared for the American Historical Association in the AHA Annual Reports 1904Google Scholar: Bourne, Henry E., “The Work of the American Historical Societies,” pp. 117–27Google Scholar; Moore, Frederick Wrightman, comp., “First Report of the Conference of State and Local Historical Societies,” 1904, pp. 221–34Google Scholar; Severance, Frank H., “Second Report of the Conference of State and Local Historical Societies,” 1905, 1: 177–217Google Scholar; Thwaites, Reuben Gold et al. , “Report of the Committee on Methods of Organization and Work on the Part of State and Local Historical Societies,” 1905, 1: 250–325Google Scholar. The bibligraphy prepared by A. P. C. Griffin (n. 14) was prepared in connection with this work.

51. Descriptions of collections appear in Bell et al., Cabinet of Curiosities; Whitehill, Independent Historical Societies and East India Marine Society; Dunlap, , American Historical SocietiesGoogle Scholar; Corson, , Historical Society of PennsylvaniaGoogle Scholar; and Wittlin, Alma S., Museums: In Search of A Usable Future (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970), esp. pp. 106Google Scholar ff. More useful, of course, are the periodic reports of curators and librarians, e.g., Lincoln, William, “Report of the Council,” 05 29, 1839Google Scholar, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (1912), pp. 375–76.Google Scholar

52. N. 40, and Harris, Neil, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), esp. pp. 39–43Google Scholar. On Peale and the gallery, see Sellers, Charles Coleman, Charles Wilson Peale (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969)Google Scholar, his earlier study, “Charles Wilson Peale,” American Philosophical Society Memoirs 23, Parts 1–2 (1947)Google Scholar, and Mr. Peale's Museum: Charles Wilson Peale and the First Popular Museum of Natural Science and Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980).Google Scholar

Periodic attempts to present the Western Museum of Cincinnati as an even better bad example, as in Louis Leonard Tucker, “‘Ohio Show Shop’: the Western Museum of Cincinnati, 1820–1867” in Bell, et al. , Cabinet of Curiosities, pp. 73–105Google Scholar, have been unsuccessful, leaving the Queen City out in the cold, again.

53. [Appleton's] New American Cyclopaedia (1857)Google Scholar s.v. “Museum.” No better example may be found of the full acceptance of the pastness of the past and the uselessness of past knowledge than the decision of Appleton to begin issuing annual “updates” of the Cyclopaedia immediately after the final volume was issued, beginning in 1861.

54. Whitehill, , Independent Historical Societies, pp. 29–30.Google Scholar

55. The most notable exception to the mid-nineteenth-century rule of the acceptability of mixed collections-the long debate between Joseph Henry and Spencer Fullerton Baird concerning the program of the Smithsonian Institution-is actually no exception at all, for it turned on whether the Smithsonian should become the nation's museum at all, not on whether the collections in such a museum should be restricted to one kind of thing. Cf. Dall, William H., Spencer Fullerton Baird: A Biography (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1915)Google Scholar, and esp. Washburn, Wilcomb E., “Joseph Henry's Conception of the Purpose of the Smithsonian Institution,”Google Scholar in Bell, et al. , Cabinet of Curiosities, pp. 106–66.Google Scholar

56. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “History,” (1836)Google Scholar in Essays. First Series (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1841)Google Scholar. Emerson's apparent resistance to contemporary ideas of progress and its corollary, the pastness of the past, is the theme of Matthiessen, Francis Otto, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941)Google Scholar, but I am especially indebted to the late Stephen E. Whicher for his explorations of Emerson's (and Hawthorne's) transformations of the older conventions of emblem and exemplum into devices useful in the nineteenth century, in classroom lectures at Cornell University, 1959–60, and in his two-volume study of Emerson published as Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953)Google Scholar, and Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1957).Google Scholar

57. On the legitimacy of the miscellany as literature, see Whicher, George F., Walden Revisited: A Centennial Tribute to Henry David Thoreau (Chicago: Packard & Co., 1945).Google Scholar

58. The principles of general subject and alphabetic classification are articulated in Rhees, William J., comp., Manual of Public Libraries, Institutions, and Societies in the United States, and British Provinces of North America (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1859), pp. xiv–xviGoogle Scholar. See also Haven, Samuel F., “Librarian's Report,” 10 23, 1838Google Scholar, May 29, 1839, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (1912), pp. 364, 378.Google Scholar

59. A brief sketch of the mid-nineteenth-century debate on pantology, conceived as a conflict between Comteans and Spencerians, appears in Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed. (1910)Google Scholar, s.v. “Classification.” See also, e.g., Park, Roswell, “Address on the Classification of Human Knowledge,” Transactions of the Western Literary Institute and College of Professional Teachers 1840 (Cincinnati, 1841), 151–68.Google Scholar